Wednesday, March 14, 2012

A Visit to Greenland

I stayed in Greenland’s tiny capital city, Nuuk, for
two weeks in 2006, while researching my book The Far Traveler. My hosts were Kristjana,
an Icelander, and her husband, Jonathan Motzfeldt, an Inuit known as the
“father of his country” for having negotiated Greenland’s semi-independence
from Denmark. Jonathan was prime minister of the Home Rule government for many
years and remained a significant voice in politics when I met him; he died in
2010. Here’s how I remember him:

One night over tea and
cookies, we watched a Greenlandic TV program about independence, on which he
was featured. I asked if he was in favor of it. “Someday,” he replied, “but not
in my time.” Although ninety percent of Greenland’s people are indigenous Inuit,
Danish subsidies, he explained, built Greenland’s airports and public
buildings, including the new university complex going up next to the Institute
of Natural Sciences, where Kristjana works. Half of the Home Rule government’s
expenditures come from Denmark—and nearly half of Greenland’s workers are
government employees. Initiatives the Danes are backing include mining for
gold, extracting low-temperature enzymes from glacial lakes, bottling glacier
water, tourism and archaeology, and—harking back to the Viking era—sheep
farming.

For dinner, Jonathan had
boiled a joint from a sheep raised on Eirik the Red’s farm—an old sheep, he said, his dark face lit
with a cartoonish grin. He repeated it several times, with emphasis, “Eirik the
Red’s ooooold sheep.” He seemed to be
testing the extent of my American fussiness (later he would serve boiled
eiderduck and noisily enjoy sucking the duck’s feet). But I knew he was
teasing. I had taken to him the first time we met. Trim and neat, he turned
Kristjana into a giant: he hardly came up to her ear. His smile was as sunny as
a child’s—and as apparently irrepressible. Appropriately solemn-faced
discussing the eight suicides Nuuk had seen in the two weeks since I had
arrived in Greenland, he was beaming again as soon as Kristjana changed the
subject. Now, he served the sheep broth first, tiny potatoes and rice floating
in it, then put the big, dry, chewy hunk
of grayish meat and bone, glistening with little white globs of fat, on a
platter. He handed me a penknife and a glass of red wine.

One perk of Jonathan’s
position was the Motzfeldt’s house: high, glass-fronted, it overlooked the bay
like the prow of a ship. At the breakfast table one morning, his pipe curled in
a meaty fist, Jonathan shouted out, “There!” and “There!,” picking out herds of
seal as they swam by. Through binoculars, I saw a flurry of little triangular
flippers and smooth black backs before they dove again. Another day, reading a
book on Greenland from the Motzfeldts’ excellent library, I was startled to my
feet by the Hoosh-Wash of a whale
breaching. Hurrying outside, I hung over the cliffside with a neighbor and her
two children to see four more jets and a pair of flukes.

Each morning before the fog
burned off, a flotilla of small boats would etch silver lines away from the
harbor. There was no other way to get out of town, I’d soon learned, unless you
flew.

“Do you notice all the boats
are going into the fjords?,”
Kristjana said wistfully one day. She ran a hand through her blonde, boy-cut
hair and took a drag on her cigarette. “That’s where spring is.”

I had been introduced to
Kristjana by an Icelandic friend, a botanist who worked with her in southern
Greenland on a project to stem erosion caused by the sheep farming. Learning of
my plans to visit the Viking sites near Nuuk, Kristjana had immediately volunteered
to take me there, but the Motzfeldts’ boat had gone in for repairs in November,
just after we started planning our trip, and being “father of your country”
doesn’t unfortunately get your boat fixed any sooner in Nuuk. Greenland,
Kristjana agreed, was mis-named. It should have been called “Maybe-Land.”

“Maybe you can go to Sandnes
with Georg on Tuesday.” Georg Nyegaard, a Danish archaeologist working at the
National Museum of Greenland, was going to inspect a farmer’s potato patch near
the Viking site: Greenland has no private property; every individual use of
land is approved and monitored by a government committee, and the museum
officials suspected this potato patch was encroaching on the archaeology.

“Maybe we can go with the
Swedish ambassador,” Kristjana said another day. “He said he’d like to see
Sandnes. His yacht is luxury, much
better than our boat—except that one motor is broken.”

Tupilak Travel had a boat
going to a different spot known for Viking ruins—down the fjord just north of
Nuuk—but the trip was cancelled at the last moment: The wind was too strong.

By the time the Motzfeldt’s
boat was finally ready, Jonathan had been called away to Copenhagen and
Kristjana was drowning in things to do before she herself left for Italy a few
days later. So she turned me and the boat over to Tobias, whom she introduced
as Jonathan’s chauffeur.

“You have a map, you know
where you want to go, good, good,” she said, brushing away my doubts. “Tobias
will get you there”—despite the fact that he spoke no English (or Icelandic)
and I spoke no Greenlandic (or Danish). His wife Rusina would be going, too, I
learned when I met them at the boat early Saturday morning. “Beautiful!” she
said, with an expansive wave of one hand, as we passed the dramatic mountains
that marked the harbor mouth. It was her favorite (and almost her only) English
word.

But we did get to the Viking
ruins at Sandnes—you can read about it in The
Far Traveler—and we did, in spite of the strengthening wind and the
growling sea, get safely back.

Just published!

Coming in September

About Me

I am the author of one young adult novel and six books of nonfiction.
I write about Iceland and Vikings, science and sagas. My books combine extremes: medieval literature and modern archaeology, myths and facts. They ask, What have we overlooked? What have we forgotten? Whose history must not be lost?
If you'd like me to give a talk at your bookclub, store, school, or other venue, just let me know and we'll see what we can work out.
I live in Vermont with my husband, the writer Charles Fergus, and our four Icelandic horses and one Icelandic sheepdog. I offer tours to Iceland through the company America2Iceland.com
Visit me at nancymariebrown.com